Barriers to Successful Implementation of Community Engagement Software by American Local Governments

Efforts to facilitate greater citizen participation in the deliberations and decision making of public officials in the United States reflect an understanding of democratic citizenship that is not implicated by the laws governing citizens’ access to government information, processes, and procedures. In fact, so-called “sunshine laws” from the federal Freedom of Information Act to State-level Open Meeting laws actually prevent, or very strictly circumscribe, the inclusion of private citizens in the deliberations of public officials by design. At present, rules and procedures guaranteeing the right of private citizens to participate in policy making processes do exist at the national, state, and local levels in the United States, but none offer the public a direct role in the deliberations of elected or appointed officials, in part, because while the impetus for creating these laws was to increase the general public’s influence, the resulting legislative enactments were specifically designed to prevent the narrowly self-interested and disproportionate influence of elites and well-financed “special interests” in policy deliberations held behind closed doors. Have laws intended to increase citizen influence by creating legal rights of access to policy deliberations, as well as complex procedures by which to protect and administer these rights, unintentionally limited the quality of that now codified influence? In the process, have these laws created complications that have frustrated the ability of public officials themselves to engage in the highest quality deliberations about the matters before them? Can 21st Century innovations in communications technology be leveraged to increase the quality of government decision making? Can internet communications technology (ICT) be used to increase the quantity and quality of citizen participation in government decision making without significant changes to current law? If statutory reforms are necessary to leverage the power of internet Communications Technology to increase the quality of citizen influence and involvement in government decision making, what would those reforms look like and what are the political prospects for such legislation at the federal and state levels? In this paper I will explore these questions through the lens of the scholarly literature on citizen participation in the United States and attempt to answer them more precisely by focusing on one state, Massachusetts, and one law, the Bay State’s Open Meeting Law (OML). Through a thorough examination of the public record, as well as interviews with appropriate legal and political experts, I will describe and discuss the history of the Massachusetts OML, amended many times since its enactment in 1975, detailing the legal and political paths of OML cases, controversies, challenges, and amendments, with an eye toward anticipating the legal and political obstacles to using ICT to increase the quality of citizen participation in the deliberations of the state’s locally elected boards and committees. Massachusetts-specific findings will be used to suggest future research directions in other states and at the federal level regarding the use of ICT to improve the quality of citizen participation in government deliberations.